German Studies

The German Studies Section offers courses ranging from intensive elementary German to the age of Goethe, from the urban modernity of Vienna and Berlin to German Cinema and contemporary popular culture.

German is spoken in three countries with diverse cultural, political, and economic traditions: The Federal Republic of Germany, Austria, and Switzerland. It is also the mother tongue of significant minorities in neighboring countries. Among Europeans, in fact, the approximately 98 million native speakers of German greatly outnumber those of English, French, Italian (58-60 million each), or Spanish (36 million). In business, diplomacy, and tourism, German ranks second to English in Western Europe, and in Eastern Europe it holds first place. Knowledge of German grants access not only to rich literary, philosophical, and artistic traditions but also to many other kinds of contemporary cultural, economic, political, and scientific developments. German at Swarthmore therefore offers a curriculum that reflects these wide-ranging interests.

The core faculty and staff of German Studies at Swarthmore personally and professionally contribute to the inter-cultural and inter-disciplinary nature of German Studies. Hansjakob Werlen, a native of Switzerland, has published on 19th-century writers Kleist and Herder as well as on the works of Canetti. His scholarship has intersected with Bryn Mawr colleague Azade Seyhan's focus on minority literatures in Switzerland and Germany for co-taught classes on diasporic writing. Sunka Simon, hailing from the North-German Hamburg, has published on Elfriede Jelinek, German film, and popular culture. She is working on a book on concepts of regionalism and globalization in German television. Christopher Schnader, Pennsylvania-born and a Berlin transplant, earned his Ph.D. with a dissertation on friendship in 18th-century Germany. He enlivens German conversation courses with his knowledge of contemporary German socio-political and cultural events.

German Studies News

German Language Table

The German Language Table is held at Sharples Dining Hall room #209 every Friday at 12:30 p.m. Enjoy relaxed and informal German conversation while you have your lunch.

Ben Goossen '13 received a Fulbright Scholarship for 2013/2014 to study German history in Berlin. A double major in German Studies and History at Swarthmore, Ben is continuing to research the historic relationship between Mennonites and German nationalism, the topic of his undergraduate thesis. In the fall of 2014 he will be entering the PhD program for history at Harvard University, where he plans to study global environmental history.

Max Nesterak '13, a double major in German Studies and English Literature: As a recipient of the Fulbright Full Research Grant for 2013-14, I will spend a year in Berlin pursuing independent research on how multiethnic communities use street art and urban interventions to claim space and articulate identity in the public sphere. I will be studying reports of protests and street art from unification onward while maintaining an active blog of current movements in order to better understand how people change public space for political and ideological ends. I will work closely with faculty in the Institute of Art History at Free University and in the Institute of Art and Visual History at Humboldt University. Following my Fulbright, I hope to get a job.

Sind Sie sicher? German Studies Symposium on Surveillance and (Post)-Privacy

From Cold War espionage and the post-9/11 patriot act to media-facilitated global (Self-)Surveillance - How do past iterations and memories of surveillance, control and terrorism in German-speaking cultures (e.g. the cultural legacy of the GDR or RAF terrorism) inform current NSA-debates? What theories can be used to analyze the reconfiguration of the private sphere? How are civil rights to be re-conceptualized in “post-privacy” societies? What imaginative and creative approaches in literature, film and television are used to tackle issues of censorship, security and surveillance? What contributions can genre-specific works (such as travel writing or futuristic science fiction) make to these debates? How are intersections between technology (e.g. biometrics, media surveillance), security and/or terrorism processed?

Upcoming Events

Language Resource Center

The Language Resource Center provides resources to enhance the study of foreign language, literature, and culture at Swarthmore College. At the LRC, students may access software and audio and video material required for foreign language classes, watch foreign language TV and movies, browse the web on computers optimized to support non-Western languages, and borrow equipment such as video cameras for use in creating multimedia projects.